Saturday 6 August 2016

Winging it across the Americas; a prelogue

I wasn't going to bother writing much on here until I'd actually done a bit of travelling. But five/six beers, a slightly emotional leaving do with friends and the fact that, three days before a seven month trip, the magnitude of it is starting to actually hit me, has put me in  a kind of spontaneous, writing more. So Belle and Sebastian's playing, and I'm stupidly attempting to write at twenty-two minutes to Eleven. I probably wasn't going to sleep much tonight anyway! For the sake of stopping my waffling, there should really be a purpose to this post, so let me outline my trip in a bit more detail.

On Tuesday 9th August, I fly from Gatwick to Pearson International Airport, Toronto. After this comes a day in Toronto, a day of travelling and a day of training, including "handling firearms" should I encounter a bloodthirsty Bear. note, I cannot stress enough how unlikely this is, it's simply a precautionary principle as they're a big wild animal and, well, they have killed people before. I'll be fine though. Stop bloody worrying! I don't get into dangerous situations when travelling, that categorically never happens.
Anyway, by the 13th I find myself in James Bay. Not the singer, the water body in Northern Canada. Since hardly anyone's heard of it (I hadn't until about a year ago), here's roughly where it is, that southernmost sticky-out bit of the enormous Hudson Bay.

On these vast tidal mudflats, I'll be surveying for migratory birds. A huge number of wading birds, having bred even further north in the Tundra, stop here to feed. Then, having had their pit stop, some of them will fly non-stop as far as the eastern seaboard for another stopover. Particularly adventurous species then head out into the sea, in a great, 4,000km loop that eventually sees them land on the coast of Brazil. This is migration on a truly epic scale!! Species like Hudsonian Godwit (Limosa haemastica) and American Golden Plover (Pluvialis dominica) are among the most incredible migrants taking this sort of journey. Naturally, if a species only needs one stop-off in a couple of thousand miles, it'll pick the best one, and James Bay is thus the one area that staggering congregations of many species feed up and refuel for a few days, before continuing their epic globetrotting.
My job is to walk transects, getting accurate counts and age ratios (i.e. whether a bird is a juvenile or an adult, easily done by plumage in autumn). I'm also on the look out for two particularly endangered species, the previously mentioned Hudsonian Godwit, and the Red Knot's american subspecies, Calidris canutus rufa. One important part of conserving these birds studying their migration routes, through attaching coloured tags to their legs that identify specific birds. So alongside counting all the birds present, I'll also be trying to find and read these tags, to help track the movement of these very vulnerable birds.
a breeding plumage Hudsonian Godwit

I finish here on September 13th. I'll be totally without internet at this time, so will have to update the blog soon afterwards! I then get four days off in Toronto, waiting for friends from the UK to arrive. When Peter and Jamie get here on the 17th, we'll all head down to Long Point Bird observatory, where I was also lucky to spend four months last autumn. I'll be here for just two months this time around, once again studying bird migration as they're funneled through a narrow spot in the Great Lakes. Long Point's a 40km long sandspit sticking out into Lake Erie, with sparse vegetation and even sparser habitation, for most of the autumn the six or so volunteers out at "The Tip" are the only people present on the outer reaches of the peninsula. At the base there are a few small communities, plus another field station (Old Cut) from which Long Point's day-to-day administration is run. You can just about make out where Long Point is on the image below, to give some sense of scale it's about 80km SW of Niagara Falls. 


That'll be two months, including my 21st birthday! The season here ends on 15 November, after which I get another little city break in Toronto, for about a week. Then, on 22 November, I fly down to Ecuador. This is the most exciting part of all for me, I'll be volunteering as a tour guide/general helper at Tandayapa Bird Lodge, a brilliant ecotourism lodge in the Cloud Forest. The birds will be phenomenal, but I'm also really looking forward to practising my Spanish! It's also the only time in this whole trip I'll be anywhere near civilisation, so I might make the most of being near a few bars for a while! It's also my first time in South America, Costa Rica being the closest I've got to the promised land so far. All in all, it promised to be another brilliant experience!

I'm pretty much prepared now; papers printed, clothes packed, most other things will find their space in my luggage, or be cast aside, in the next two days. I've downloaded enough Spanish podcasts to last me at least until I next get internet in September, have brought most of the necessary equipment, saved up enough from my job that I won't be wanting for beer money, and I'm just waiting to hit the road now! I'll do my best to keep everyone updated whenever I can, so keep an eye out!

For now, I maybe ought to actually sleep, so I'll write in here soon. By which I mean either once I arrive in Canada, or sometime in mid-September; it'll largely depend on whether I've got anything to write about from the brief period before I lose internet connection!

Ciao for now,

Liam